Earl and the Duke

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TALK story about jazz crooner Earl Coleman, Coleman's memorial service, and the story when Coleman first saw Duke Ellington in Mississippi. In Harlem, on a recent winter night, musicians and friends gathered to memorialize Earl Coleman. Sonny Rollins, Etta Jones, Houston Person, Danny Knight, Bertha Hope, Mike Abene, and Jerry Dodgion, all backed by the bass of Bob Cranshaw and the drums of Leroy Williams. Coleman, whose most famous recording was "This Is Always," with Charlie Parker, died last July at sixty-nine. Coleman began his career with the big bands of Jay McShann and Earl Hines. In his baritone phrasing, thick, romantic tones rose up from the gutbucket into wide clouds of lyricism. Coleman had kicked back in penthouses, and he had sweated on a chain gang. Coleman said that he was one of those who came up when being a classy person with darker than white skin could mean trouble. The last time the author talked with Coleman, he recalled being a Southern kid, on his bicycle more than fifty years ago and seeing posters that announced the arrival of Duke Ellington's band. He told of a magical afternoon in Mississippi and of pedalling out to the train station, where he heard the sound of Duke Ellington's brass men warming up. Then he looked through the windows at the Ellingtonians, inside the private Pullman cars. He remembered the spit and polish of the Negro men who were serving them, in movements swift but casual with authority. There were also thrilled and thrilling women there, all those fine brown felines visiting the artist who set the romantic standards for men from coast to coast, border to border. That night, Coleman attended the dance where Ellington's band was performing. Negroes took to the floor on every tune, and whites sat behind ropes. During intermission the smooth-looking Ellington sat at a table with the whites who ran the town, but he sat not as the target of a joke or as some version of inferiority. Coleman was always savoring that moment as a Mississippi dreamer in his teens, back down the staircase of time to the point where he saw just how far real talent could take someone, no matter where on the social spectrum that someone had come from.